Top 7 Places to Watch Great Minds in Action

Reproduced in part from Mashable: The Social Media Guide

Here is a list of the top 7 places to watch great minds in action. What makes these conferences special is both the people they’re able to assemble together in one place and that they put videos of the experiences online for everyone to enjoy.

Founded in 1984 by Richard Saul Wurman, the Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) conference is a now three times per year gathering that brings together some of the world’s most influential and innovative creative thinkers to share, teach, and learn across multiple disciplines.

Held every year in a quaint seaside village in New England, Pop!Tech attracts 500 visionary thinkers to a restored, 19th-century opera house to talk about “science, technology and the future of ideas.” Pop!Tech attendees are among the best and the brightest in their fields.

Held each year in a theater in downtown Providence, the Business Innovation Factory’s annual Collaborative Innovation Summit is a meeting place for some of the world’s most interesting people. Attendees come together to discuss innovation and share experiences in a small, intimate setting.

Gel, or the “Good Experience Live,” bills itself as “an eclectic, mind-expanding event that includes presenters from many different disciplines – design, technology, business, and so on – [that] attracts an audience of similar diversity.” The two-day conference has been held every year in New York since 2003 (and once in Copenhagen, Denmark in 2006).

BIL, which stands for “Breeding. Impromptu. Luminary.” is an ad-hoc conference for big thinkers that’s held each year in whatever city is hosting TED. BIL originally began as a group of people planning to crash the TED conference in 2007 in Monterey, California (where TED was held back then), but as the group grew, they decided instead to hold their own unconference across the street.